Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Airlines in Defensive Crouch Over Blizzard Flight Chaos

Airlines assumed their familiar defensive crouch over massive flight cancellations and excessive delays that still are buckling airports in New York.

Though part of the blame was aimed accurately at the severity of the blizzard and its high winds, not to mention the incompetence and outright laziness of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (which runs the airports), the airlines are now also in the public-opinion cross-hairs.

The reasons:

1. Failure to ensure even a modicum of customer service and responsiveness, as over 1 million passengers got stranded by cancellations, and even more by delays. There was an obvious initiative to preemptively cancel flights, even before the weather conditions deteriorated to the point where flying was impossible. Customers are livid about not being able to get through to airlines as the chaos built.

2. As airlines shank capacity and parked planes to shave operating costs in the last 18 months, and as airline mergers further constricted the system, there is no slack to handle even minor disruptions. Especially in a peak holiday travel season, all the planes were already full, so there was no way (especially because backup equipment and crews are pretty much a thing of the past) to handle the extra demand from passengers who were bumped off those 8,000-plus canceled flights.

Flights continue to be canceled today at the New York airports, though in far fewer numbers than recent days. Excessive delays (45 minutes and up) are also occurring. At the hilariously named Newark Liberty International Airport, 121 flights have been scrubbed as of mid-morning. At Kennedy, the number is 142. At La Guardia, it's 51.

1 comment:

James
said...

One wonders how long until the next fight becomes a requirement for airlines to get paying passengers to their destination within 48 hours of resuming flights, or some such. Or provide compensation. (Maybe dependent on when a connection is canceled, or the like.)

I've already read of a couple cases where people rented cars to drive for 10-20 hours when told they wouldn't get a flight for 4+ days.

Bio

Joe Sharkey's work appears in major national and international publications. For 19 years until 2015 he was a weekly columnist for the New York Times. He is now a weekly travel and entertainment columnist with the global website Travel.Buzz, as well as an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Arizona, He has written five books, four non-fiction and a novel, one of which is in development as a movie. Previously, he was an assistant national editor at the Wall Street Journal and a reporter and columnist with the Philadelphia Inquirer.
On Sept. 29, 2006, he was one of seven people on a business jet who survived a mid-air collision with a 737 over the Amazon. All 154 on the 737 died. His report on the crash appeared on the front page of the New York Times and later in the Sunday Times of London magazine.
He and his wife Nancy (who is a professor of journalism at the University of Arizona) live in Tucson with horses and parrots. He is working on a new novel about an international travel writer who hates to travel.
"JoeSharkey.com" is Copyright (c) 2006-2015 by Joe Sharkey.